Payette, Julie

Julie Payette, (born October 20, 1963, Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Canadian astronaut and engineer who was named the 29th governor-general of Canada (2017–21).

Payette received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from McGill University in Montreal in 1986 and a master’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Toronto in 1990. She worked at IBM Canada and Bell Northern Research in Montreal before she was selected for the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut corps in 1992. Payette then worked on the Mobile Servicing System, a robotic manipulator for the International Space Station (ISS) that later became known as Canadarm2.

In 1996 Payette began two years of astronaut training in the U.S. at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Her first spaceflight, STS-96 (May 27 to June 6, 1999), was the second spaceflight to the ISS. This mission carried 2 tonnes of supplies to the ISS in preparation for the arrival of the first crew. Payette supervised a space walk that installed two cranes on the outside of the station.

From 2000 to 2007 Payette was the CSA’s chief astronaut. She went into space again on the space shuttle Endeavour as part of the STS-127 mission (July 15 to 31, 2009), which installed a module of experiments exposed to the vacuum of space onto the outside of Kibo, the Japanese-built laboratory module of the ISS. Payette operated the shuttle’s robotic arm during the space walks that installed the experiment module.

Payette retired from the CSA in 2013. She was chief operating officer of the Montreal Science Centre and vice president of Canada Lands Company from 2013 to 2016. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 named her governor-general to succeed David Johnston. She resigned in 2021 after a Privy Council Office report found that she had harassed and bullied her employees.

Her many awards and honours included Officer of the Order of Canada (2010) and honorary doctorates from several Canadian universities.